Hello all,

I am new to this forum and also to filemaker. I have seen my colleagues use it and I believe it is what I need for my purpose and have now installed FM Pro 14 to get going.

I would like to organise my vast classical music recording library in my house that consists of  many recordings saved on various  types of media, including Lps, cassettes, Reel to Reel tapes (alot of them), DVD, VHS, BluRay and also on my computer hard drives. I am in need of some assistance and some ideas how to go about building a database with relationships as to facilitate searching for a specific recording or an artist etc. I would like to be able to display my collection by say tape number (considering also that my reel to reel tapes are of various diameter sizes) and want to catalogue them as they are filed in my shelves at the moment by reel sizes. Each reel of tape has a number on it, starting from 1. The large reels of tape (120 of them) are numbered from 1-120 and the smaller reels that are also grouped together are also number from 1 upwards. This is causing a bit of confusion as how to be able to set up a database. In the fields I would like to include as much information as possible for my collection, including details such as Composer, artist, soloist, orchestra or ensemble, and the contents of the recordings, such as Symphony No. 4 op.4 and all the details of the movements of the work. As these are home made recordings, each tape might have different composers on it. Also I would like to include technical details such as: tape speed, tape type, spool type, box type, and information if any blank tape is left on the reel ( and how many minutes)  or if the reel is full. If searching for a particular composer or work I wish that the database would guide me also to all the recordings I have and on which media it is on (whether LP, Cassette etc). The more information I can put in to access my library and can search for anything depending on what I input in my search would be truly ideal. I looked at other programs but I believe as this is a very specialized database, I need to set up a database using such a professional program.

I hope that anyone can help me and if anyone might have  a similar database that they are happy to share and which I can try to adapt for my needs with some help I would be most grateful. As it stands I am struggling to search for anything specific in my library without going through pages and pages in an A4 filing system and believe there must be  a clever way out there.

Many thanks,

Hi Jascha,

I suggest you open the built-in Help system, or get hold of The Missing Manual, or the FileMaker Training Series. All of them cover the topic of “data modelling”: identify your entities, their individual attributes and the relationships they have to each other. Then convert your findings into tables, fields and … well, relationships.

As a brief example: analyzing your description, it seems you want to manage

Musical Pieces, written by one or more Composers/People, performed by Artists & Conductors and recorded as Recordings, stored on Media; at first glance, that's your entities. What's their relationships? Could be

People --< Composer >-- MusicalPiece --< Recording --< Performer >-- People

This means you can describe a piece in terms of its relationship. To describe the storage of a specific recording in your library, add

Recording --< Storage >-- Medium

to the existing chain, where each medium is physical storage medium in your library that can hold one or more recordings at specific positions.

Hope this helps a bit.

I looked at other programs but I believe as this is a very specialized database, I need to set up a database using such a professional program.

​Not entirely; from a certain perspective, a database is a database … My pet project is a movie database, which started its existence as the attempt to manage recordings on VHS tapes – a requirement almost identical to yours.